Names: Robert Lee Sowarsh, James Perry Sinclair, James Irvin PlanceLocation: Former McCormick ranch in Stratton, 150 miles east of Denver.Agency: Thirteenth Judicial District Attorney’s OfficeDate killed: In the 1970s and early 1980sCause of DeathShotgun blasts, strangulation and bludgeoning.Suspects: Tom McCormick, who is deceased, and his son Michael McCormick.

The people who could be Colorado’s most prolific killers might have gotten away with murder because of a lack of funding for state and local investigators and conflicting versions of what happened.

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Michael McCormick told authorities his father killed up to 18 men

In February 1986, Michael McCormick led detectoves to the graves of three men, Robert Lee Sowarsh, James Perry Sinclair and James Irvin Plance, and he claimed there were more bodies buried on his father’s 2,800-acre ranch near Stratton in Kit Carson County.

The search was halted, then-CBI director Neil Moloney and local authorities said at the time, because of a lack of money.
Officials said no charges were ever filed agaist the man Michael McCormick accused – his own father – because of his lack of credibility. Mike McCormick accused his father of the Aug. 30, 1983, murder of Idaho trucker Hurbert “Bert” Donoho, 60. He claimed Tom McCormick struck Donoho with a sledge hammer and he helped his father put the body in a sleeping bag and bury it in a wheat field near Byers, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.